The clutch failed!
I was approaching a junction to turn right, de-clutched and there was a 'jolt' through the clutch pedal and I couldn't engage 1st gear (or any other gear for that matter). So I managed to get in to the right hand turn, rolled it down a hill and pulled in to a local school driveway and called the AA. The car would not engage any gear but would 'creep' forward when I pushed the gear stick against the gear selector, I know that gearbox is working on and it is clutch related.
The AA man turned up and plonked some clutch fluid in and pumped the clutch to see if it could be a leak in the slave cylinder, then pumped the clutch pedal but it made no difference.
Then I had to wait for another AA man to come out and tow me home. Whilst waiting for him I turned the engine off for a bit and then tried restarting it but it struggled massively to fire up, and was 'chugging' around 500 rpm. The throttle was non-responsive although the engine was running but what really shocked me and is quite worrying is that the engine temperature slowly creeped right up towards the higher end of the scale on the needle. Why would it do this? Surely engine temperature has nothing to do with the clutch? I turned the engine off and the engine cooled down but I don't know how this relates to clutch failure and just to clarify, the engine temperature had not creeped up before the clutch failure.
Either way I'm now totally stuck, all this hard work and now this. Personally I think the garage who installed the clutch and gearbox for me may have made a serious installation error and I'm considering having the car taken on a flat loader to GRN to see if they can sort it for me.
One consolation, I have garage repair cover on my AA policy, at least that should ease the burden!
I'm moving house this week as well, could the timing of all this be worse on top of the fact that I was on my way to work and I've lost a shift tonight because if it.
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